Intro: The 12 Days Of Christmas Memories
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Closing
--------
When I was a kid, it was easy to delight me with presents. When I badly wanted something that I couldn't buy for myself, unwrapping a package and seeing the object of my desire within was as good as it gets. As I got older, in my teenage years, what I wanted for Christmas wasn't something you could wrap and put under a tree (or at least, from the shape of the package, it wouldn't have been much of a surprise). And as I continued to grow up, once I had the money to buy things for myself, it became harder to wow me with a present. Because I was more aware of the world, it also became more difficult to get me a present that I wasn't expecting. (Books don't count.)
In 1988, Dad first got me a calendar for Christmas. (This paragraph is still background.) It was a golf calendar -- I didn't have a calendar up in my room before then, so it was functional. The following year, Dad said, "Screw it, you're getting old enough, let's put some titties on that wall." Okay, I'm sure he didn't say that, but for the next several years, I found a swimsuit calendar under the Christmas tree. These were solid gifts, although back then I didn't have a lot of girls visiting my bedroom.
(Because I never tire of telling this story: I got a particular problem on the AP U.S. History exam correct because of Cindy Crawford. She once said that she was the second most famous thing to come out of DeKalb -- after barbed wire -- and this allowed me to rule out a possible answer on a multiple choice question, only because it involved DeKalb and would have been even more famous than barbed wire if correct. And I never would have carefully read every word of a Cindy Crawford interview if I hadn't gained a respectful admiration for her, due to her presence on my wall for all of 1993. Thanks, Dad!)
My sophomore year of college, I received a homemade gift to put on my wall. Even the wrapping paper was homemade, from several sheets of computer paper printed with images of Lego sets. Inside the box was a calendar, printed on the computer and then laminated. It had the usual layout to hang from a punched hole at the top, with the calendar for the month on the bottom page, but for the top page, each month's image was of a famous Lego set or a Lego theme.
I'm not sure I'm explaining this well enough. I had a Lego calendar!
Want pictures?
I had a calendar where October was Camouflaged Outpost!
Teddy and Allison helped my parents put these together (the initials are on the back are theirs). Ben got one, too -- his theme was movies, usually with a defining quote. Die Hard was on there with the Jon McClane quote, "NO FUCKING SHIT, LADY!" Intriguing selection -- "Yippie ki-yay" would have been the standard choice, but I think this has more punch. I'm sure Alien made an appearance, although there are so many quotes to choose from that I'm not sure which it would have been. "Game over, man!" "They mostly come out at night. Mostly." "Get away from her, you bitch!" Really, there's not a wrong choice in the bunch.
So...yeah. A Lego calendar!!! But to my chagrin, the year had to come to an end sooner or later. On to a more boring 1998, then, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment